


A place to rest and forget yourself

by lotesse



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Abandonment, Condoms, F/M, Marijuana, Recreational Drug Use, Running, Sibling Incest, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-19 01:45:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fiona he'd kill for, if she'd ever wanted him to, but she never would; Fiona doesn't burn inside like he does. Fiona is dark still water, cold and fathomless, and sometimes Lip sees her drowning but he's a thirsty man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A place to rest and forget yourself

When Fiona was in high school she ran every morning for hours, as if by going fast enough she could outpace Monica's manic episodes and how fast Ian was shooting up tall, the accelerated pace of her parents' biological clocks, the fall of hour after hour and day after day in the sequence of her passing life. 

Her body was a willing instrument, built bony and long-legged, and with the crash and roar of the surf against the Chicago lakeshore for her only rhythm she let herself lengthen out, expand, burst the boundaries of her life and become something incandescent and momentary, her feet coming temporarily unglued from the earth.

When she runs for long enough, goes fast enough, she can almost forget it all. 

She stops running after Monica leaves, after Frank bottoms out in the wake of her departure. Mostly it's because she doesn't have the time, too busy what with holding two jobs and trying to keep up in school and learning how to look after a baby and holding everything together for the kids. School goes first, and after the first month she realizes that forgetfulness isn't a luxury she can afford any more. It's become her job to remember, now: Carl's field trip and Ian's homework and Liam's bottle, to check periodically and make sure that Debs wasn't getting too anxious, to help Lip keep his head on straight. The problems of what, it seemed, was going to be her life now needed to be faced head-on, not run away from. 

That's where Monica had always fucked it up – she ran away into her head, submerged herself in Frank's libido or her own sadness and just let it all go to hell. And Fiona's damned if she's going to ever run away from those kids. So, no more running, okay. She can do that. Maybe she and Debs will start walking with Liam every morning instead. Get some use out of her shoes; she'd bought them new, on layaway, and waste isn't something she can afford anymore. She's got to use every part of her kills.

*

You'd think that Lip used the weed to forget, but that's not it at all. Marijuana doesn't bring him forgetfulness, doesn't even really dull his brain. He's aced calc exams high, no problem. Deconstructing the latent homoeroticism of Shakespeare is pretty much easier lit. No, Lip smokes weed for serenity. To cool down the live coals of rage that've smouldered in his heart for what seems like fuck-ever. 

When he's lit the edges of reality go bright and blurred, and he can stay patient with Ian's bullshit secretive soap-opera drama for hours, even weeks – although, okay, Lip'll have the whole Karen thing, so he can't really talk. When Lip is high he can take Frank's bullshit, can look into the face of every grown man who's waiting to slam a door in his face and fucking smile, and be good. Weed helps Lip hold his temper down when he thinks about how weird it is that he's essentially a father of four at seventeen. When Fiona looks too tired, when Debbie freaks and goes on information benders and turns into a walking reference desk in an attempt to exert some control over her essentially chaotic environment, when Carl blows shit up and burns shit down. Weed helps, but never with forgetting. 

He passes joints with Ian and they make awkward jokes that mean too much, and after Ian passes out Lip lies on his back and looks up at the cracked plaster ceiling and thinks about his siblings in their constellated beds around him.

He's not sure if he feels worse for Debs or Carl. Debbie's more like a fretful septuagenarian than a kid, her childhood mortgaged for babysitting money and laundromat coins. Carl in contrast still hasn't matured past the age of, like, five. Lip's not sure if it's because Carl doesn't have any role models for successful adulthood, or if it's just Carl's way of checking out. Either way, the kid is fucked in the head, and the best they're going to be able to do is to try to tone down his tendencies toward sociopathy and help get him a job where he can be violently destructive and get paid for it. Teach him how to hide the bodies.

Liam, though, Liam is going to be perfectly fine, and sometimes Lip envies his baby brother so hard it hurts. Fiona's raised Liam for most of his life, and Fiona's a thousand fucking times better at being a mom than Monica ever had been. Liam is always going to know that someone will come for him, that someone will care for him. Shit, if Fiona can't get to him, Lip will. Liam might be the only Gallagher child to benefit from growing up in a stable two-parent household.

Stability had never been a characteristic of Lip's own childhood. He's not going to be able to forget that, but the way he figures, he doesn't have to care about it. He figures, done is done. Frank is Frank, mom is gone, and he's the oldest son out of six kids. And he's totally done for. Because Jesus Mary and Joseph help him but he loves every single one of the little bastards with all the breath in his body, would fight for them, die for them. Fiona he'd kill for, if she'd ever wanted him to, but she never would; Fiona doesn't burn inside like he does. Fiona is dark still water, cold and fathomless, and sometimes he sees her drowning but he's a thirsty man.

*

It's Labor Day weekend, Friday but school's out, the kind of disgusting sticky-hot that comes at the end of midwestern summer, when everyone's grown tired of sunshine and glitter and bright blue skies, when every extra day of warm weather becomes a test of the ability to endure being stifled without screaming. Monica's been gone for seven months now; Frank's been worse than useless for at least the last six.

Kev's got the kids playing touch football in the street, and in Fiona's room they can still hear the slap of worn sneakers against overheated asphalt. Ian's at work, and for once Frank is looking after the baby – there are lots of other people around, it's a holiday weekend, so they'd decided it would probably be all right to give him Liam for the afternoon. Which leaves Lip and Fiona curled bonelessly on her bed, the bare cotton sheets cooling their overheated limbs. Fiona's hair sticks, sweaty, to her neck. She'd put the pills into his hands like they were precious treasures, V's party favors snitched from the nursing home, and they'd swallowed the vicodin together. 

“Don't know why they shut everything down,” Fiona says, her voice low and husky and rasping, not because she smokes much but because she's half-feral, really, an animal barely snared by the chains of duty and family and child-love and need. “If they want to celebrate workers, let people get their hours in. And keep the kids in school so that the rest of us can get our shit done. Don't send us all home to fuck around.”

Lip's slurring when he answers her, his mouth gone numb and imprecise. “Class warfare, right, they get us to thank them for fucking us over. Fucking typical.”

Fiona's looking at him with big dark eyes, fucking doe eyes except that in Gallagher experience deer are most likely roadkill and also a welcomed and legitimate source of protein. And maybe it's a really weird train of thought but Lip Gallagher's head is a weird place, and he's scooting over and pushing Fiona's shorts down over her hipbones, dragging down her underwear to leave her dark curls exposed, and he leans in and pulls her clit into his mouth, sucking gently as a first kiss.

They're fucked up, okay. Got a problem?

Fiona makes a noise of languid floating pleasure, tripping out on heat and hydrocodone, and Lip's half-waiting for her to push him away, kick him off. He pulls back, the taste of salt and yeast heavy in his mouth, and looks up at her. She nods, once, short and decisive, but her hips are still tensed for flight. Lip puts his head back down, keeps his tongue in his mouth but just – holds her close – letting the weight of his body pin her down, the way he'd done in those first weeks when she'd started crying and hadn't been able to stop. After a minute she goes limp as a boned fish, her body melting into his touch, the enclosing delirious heat of the bed, and he licks the length of her cunt, thirsty, always thirsty.

Lips knows his sister – she'll take cunnilingus, but what Fiona really likes is being fucked, hard. He doesn't know if it's the fullness or the motion or the edge of pain but he's seen it in her again and again. It's why he'll know as soon as Tony starts sniffing around that there's nothing to worry about; Tony's a gentlemen, right, attentive and selfless, except Fiona wants to be used hard and put away wet. Mr. Manners is never gonna stand a chance. It's why he'll put up with Steve, who looks like a pretty fucking princess but Lip'll see them going at it, see the way Steve pounds Fiona raw and breathless. With a tongue in her cunt Fiona's a nice girl, if kind of a hoodrat; fucking a man she's an elemental force, ferocious and ravaged and glorious.

Fiona knows her brother, knows she can trust Lip to let feelings screw things up _just enough_ \- he won't be weird about shit, but at the same time he's not going to be a dick and act like she never mattered to him. Usually she's noisy during sex, laying down a vocal track of responsive and enthusiastic feedback, chattering through the afterglow to cover up her nerves. With Lip everything is quiet, his cock pushing into her soundlessly. She rides him to the accompaniment of their two breaths panting in and out; they sound like the crashing surf of some soft and nameless ocean, building and breaking in syncopated time.

They use a condom. Fiona's on the pill, but Gallaghers know how to be careful, even if they aren't always. Lip takes his chances with girls at school – will pay for it later on with Karen, fucking beautiful perfect impossible fake lying Karen – but with Fiona there's extra incentive for safe sex. There's something almost ritual about it, the gentle perforation of the packet, Fiona's long rough fingers unrolling the latex down his length, the slide of lubricant and spermicide sticky against his shaft, her palm. Pure, clean, no intermixture of fluids to leave the history of their sex lingering on their bodies. 

Moving in her, Lips thinks _sacred_ , and then gasps out a breathless half-laugh because isn't that something, the safest sweetest sex of his life and it's with his big sister. Well, blood's not the only thing that's thicker than water.

They pass out at some point, and when Fiona starts to move again the sun is setting, the light slanting in sideways through her western window. She sits up, runs a hand through her loose snarling hair. “I should go check on Kev and Veronica,” she says, and they've been silent for so long that her low raspy voice, as familiar to him as his name or his dick or his anger, sounds strange and new to him. 

“Can't make them keep the brat pack for too many hours at a time,” Lip agrees, lying on his stomach on Fiona's bed, bending his back to look at her as she stands, looking around for her pants. “N then send Debs for Liam, Frank'll at least be nice to her.”

Dressed now, no bra but that's her usual, Fiona looks back at him. “We okay?” she says, and part of it is a command, a fierce inflexible demand that he step up, be the man she needs to get them all through, and he responds to her need the way he always has, with set teeth and will and intentions. But there's also a sadness too shapeless for boundaries in her face, all bones and angles in the angular light. The remembered trauma of every single asshole who'd given her love and then taken off, and it's what makes him push up away from the bed, finding his feet to pull her in for a kiss that says everything they need to. 

“You ever wish you could just forget about all of us?” Lip asks her, brushing the pinked and swollen corner of her mouth with his thumb. 

“Only when the government takes away my free childcare because of national holidays,” she says, flat and flip and ironic, but he hears what she means. It's enough. He smiles slow and sleepy as he follows his sister into the gold-lit street, her feet light and swift down the stairs and out.


End file.
